What's So Great About Realism?

by Dave Rickey
2004-01-28

Reality is over-rated, dear
Don't let's be fooled by the hype
There's no such thing as tomorrow, you hear -
Amuse yourself, the time is ripe.
Reality Song, Evergreen Dayflies

When viewed objectively, the fact that the "realism" argument keeps coming
up in these games would seem odd. Bringing realism into a discussion that
includes fireballs, trolls, energy swords, blasters, and nanotechnology is,
at first glance, totally out of place. Yet come up it does, over and over,
and in the oddest contexts ("A *real* fireball would leave a smoke trail").
Somehow, in spite of the obvious incongruities, we cannot escape from the
belief that reality is the default, and departures from it are suspect and
probably false.

Games are where people go to escape reality, so why the push to make it "real"?
Because games have to ride the line between keeping our minds busy with
fantasy, yet keeping it believable enough to keep our interest, to be
fun. When you go too real or too fantasy, the balance is lost and results in
a game that has lost its spirit and isn't fun. So, often discussion about
games revolves around making them fun. And then things get ugly, because
everyone has very firm ideas about what is fun, and often those beliefs
aren't accurate even for themselves. For some strange reason, like a zen
koan about the eye that cannot see itself, players can play a game, have fun
doing so, but not really know why it is fun.

One key to the path out of this confusion comes from recent
developments in neuropsychology. What they are finding is the real
fundamental workings of neural chemistry and firing that underlay the
conscious and unconscious processes that we think of as "thinking". One is
that, although our minds are very plastic, they contain pre-dispositions,
sort of a genetically derived "BIOS" that sets the initial conditions that
allow our minds to form. The brain wiring seems to contain certain hardwired
functions, and one of these is termed "intuitive physics", a part of our
brain that, although not directly coded with knowledge of how real-world
physical processes works, is built to gather and integrate data on those
workings and form them into a set of expectations. If there is any
hard-wired function in this, it is a simple drive to identify causality:
Observable effects have identifiable causes, and we cannot help but look for
them. This tendency to identify causes for effects can get quite pronounced,
such as the phase most children go through when they imagine profound or
dire consequences from apparently innocuous actions. The roots of
superstition probably lie in trying to establish causes for otherwise
inexplicable observations. The desire to understand the ultimate causes of
the world around us fuels both science and religion, this is a very powerful
instinct we are talking about.

The other key comes from how the brain preserves neural pathways that prove
successful at making predictions and suppresses those that fail. When we
attempt something and succeed, we feel a rush of pleasure: endorphins,
dopamine, and various hormonal and neurochemical effects encourage the
neural connections that have just formed to be reinforced and optimized.
When we attempt to reach a goal and fail, we feel frustration, shame, even
anger, and similar processes discourage the neural patterns that led to the
circumstances that created those feelings. When we have a successful pattern
of goal-seeking established, and something that changes the circumstances so that
the pattern is no longer effective, we feel confusion, disorientation, even
fear, and a strong desire to re-establish the environment that fits our
earlier, successful, pattern.

Out of this, we may be able to extract an answer to one of the most vexing
questions in game design: What is fun? Fun is the process of establishing,
seeking, and achieving goals, in a larger context that gives both the
process and the results consistent meaning. Fun environments both surprise
and reassure us. They surprise us by working on rules that are very
different from those of the real world, and reassure us by having an
internal consistancy and logic that is reminiscent of that we find in the
real world. Realism is a constant theme, because the exemplar of the
environment where these things can occur is the real one. The reason why the
market for trading real cash for in-game rewards will never be stamped out
is because ultimately, they act as stand-ins for the same thing: The
underlying desire to achieve goals.